Living in today’s age of ambitious robotic exploration of Mars, with an eventual human mission to the red planet likely to happen one day, it is hard to imagine a time when Mars was a mysterious and unreachable world. And yet, before the invention of the rocket, astronomers who wanted to explore Mars beyond what they could see through their telescopes had to use their imaginations.
As a space historian and author of the book “For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet,” I’ve worked to understand how people in different times and places imagined Mars.
